DICT Undersecretary Suspended

DICT Undersecretary Suspended

The Office of the Ombudsman has ordered a six-month preventive suspension without pay for DICT Undersecretary David Almirol Jr. while it investigates alleged conflicts of interest, Manila Times and DZRH report. The order came on October 21. The case covers eight DICT contracts worth a combined ₱1.55 billion, awarded from November 2023 to May 2025, which the Ombudsman says went to companies linked to Multisys Technologies, the company Almirol founded. Almirol denies the allegations and says he has fully divested, according to Daily Tribune and DZRH. A preventive suspension is not a penalty or a finding of guilt. The case is still pending. Rappler covers the case and the rest of the DICT news in The DICT circus, Almirol's suspension, and our tech coverage refocus.

+ The same piece cites We Are Social's Digital 2027 report: 3.24 billion people, nearly 40% of the world, now use generative AI tools every month. Rappler warns that chatting with a friendly bot can mean giving away sensitive personal information, and it discusses this daily at 10am and 4pm in its #EverydayTech room in the Muni tab of the Rappler app. (Your chatbot never signed your client's NDA.)

One Link Too Many

A single ChatGPT share link, opened while you were signed in, could hand a stranger your private data. That is the finding from security researchers at Parameter Labs, summarized by developer Simon Willison in Simon Willison: How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts. ChatGPT can show small interactive web pages, called HTML previews, inside a sealed box (a sandbox) so that code cannot touch your account. The researchers found a way out. A math keyboard bundled with MathLive, a tool ChatGPT uses for graphs, accepted messages from those boxes and pasted them into the main page, which let the attackers plant an unsealed box. ChatGPT only allowed scripts from a short list of trusted sites, and YouTube was on it, so the team bounced their code off a YouTube address. After that, reading your data or acting as you was easy. OpenAI closed the hole and paid a $5,000 bug bounty, a reward for reporting flaws. Willison calls that "a bit cheap for a vulnerability this serious." We agree.

+ Same company, different headache. OpenAI has a help page titled help.openai.com: ChatGPT and Codex usage limits merging, which suggests everyday ChatGPT use and Codex, its coding assistant, will share one allowance. We only have the title, so the details are unconfirmed. On Hacker News, one commenter mocked usage measured in tokens "which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them," and another said separate limits were the main reason to prefer ChatGPT over Claude. (Tokens are the chunks of text an AI counts, roughly pieces of words.)

If you work online: Treat ChatGPT share links from strangers like any unknown link, and keep client logins and ID numbers out of your chats.

Paid to Scroll?

No tool today. Just a heads-up. Techmeme points to John Herrman's New York Magazine piece, How get-paid-to apps like Freecash pay users small sums to play games and help publishers find big spenders. New York Magazine says Freecash was briefly a top five App Store app in September. According to the summary, these apps pay users small amounts to play mobile games, and in the process help game publishers find the players most likely to spend real money. We only have the headline and summary, not the full article. The plain read is that you are the test audience, and the publisher is the paying customer. Not a side hustle.

If you work online: If a get-paid-to-play app shows up in your feed, count it as entertainment with coins, not income to plan bills around.

Extra, Extra

+ Binance reopens withdrawals: Reuters, via Techmeme: Binance resumes withdrawals in phases after covering 95% of the $6.3 billion in tokens stolen in the hack by TraderTraitor, including bitcoin and ether withdrawals. The Block, via Techmeme, reports Binance put net outflows at $3.64 billion, or 2.1% of assets, in the first 9.5 hours, while DefiLlama counts $4.05 billion over 24 hours.

+ Blocked by bureaucracy: Researchers at Y Combinator and Olam Labs set hundreds of AI agents loose in Minecraft, and Tom's Hardware reports in AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy that 50-agent teams stalled in paralyzing bureaucracy. (Anyone who has sat through a nine-person call about a three-person task saw this coming.)

+ Read the room: HackerBooks lists books mentioned on Hacker News, and one commenter quotes it as linking each book back to the comments that recommended it. Another commenter says earlier sites like it all ended up as 404 pages. (Bookmark it, then actually read one.)

+ Shift happens: nurse.org: Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare covers nurses pushing back on gig apps for shift work. One Hacker News commenter quotes the report as saying some platforms check nurses' debt through data brokers and offer lower pay to the most indebted. (Filipino nurses abroad, read the contract twice.)